PROPOSAL FOR RIVER THREATENS HISTORIC BRIDGES OF YOSEMITE

Plan for Merced prompts group to put three spans on danger list

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK 
Perhaps no river crossing in Yosemite Valley has been more photographed than the historic Stoneman Bridge: a single, arching span faced with rough-hewn granite that provides a dramatic foreground to Half Dome, the park’s most iconic natural marvel.

Yet the 205-foot bridge could be removed under proposed plans for restoring the natural flow of the Merced River. As a federally designated “Wild and Scenic River,” some say, its course should be shaped only by nature as it meanders through the valley — and bridge abutments alter that course.

The future of the roughly 80-year-old Stoneman and two other spandrel arch bridges has pitted environmentalists, who want the river to flow freely, against historic preservationists who say these early examples of the rustic park architectural style are too culturally important to destroy.

“We’re talking about nationally significant resources in arguably the best-known national park in the world,” said Anthony Veerkamp of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

It’s why last month the trust placed the Stoneman and two other Yosemite Valley stone-arch bridges threatened with removal — the Ahwahnee Bridge and the Sugar Pine Bridge — on its 2012 list of most endangered historic places.

“These are not monumental structures — they took their design cues from the environment,” Veerkamp said. “I do not envy the very complicated decisions the National Park Service has to make.”

Four other Yosemite Valley bridges cross the Merced River, but only these three are built into the river, said park spokesman Scott Gediman.

Called the “Voice of Yosemite” by famed naturalist John Muir, the Merced River flows for 81 miles in the park, from its source 13,000 feet high in the Sierra Nevada wilderness to its 317-foot drop into the tourist mecca and through it.

For more than 15 years, the park has been pressured by the courts and environmental groups to write a plan balancing public access against the strict protections that come with the river’s 1987 federal wild and scenic designation. As the process winds down, options have included everything from limiting the number of daily park visitors, to slowing riverbank erosion by restricting access, to removing lodging and some camping areas.

The wild and scenic designation left the park service leeway on how to protect the river, and Veerkamp said that protecting historic resources such as the bridges should have been recommended by the agency.

Instead, four of the five draft plans being considered by the park service include removing bridges to restore “free-flowing conditions” of the Merced.